Unusual Business Ideas That Work

Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Monday, April 30, 2012

PleaseBringMe.Com - The startup that enables locals to request items from tourists

For years now it’s been common for those travelling abroad to ask friends whether they would like anything brought back from their destination. Hoping to open this system of privately run imports and exports up to a far wider network, citizens can now request that incoming tourists bring hard to get hold of items from outside their own country through PleaseBringMe.com.

The Turkey-based site has a simple layout, with two options to click on depending on whether the user would like something brought in or are planning to visit a different country. Those heading abroad can fill in a form explaining where they are travelling from and to, the dates of their trip, and what they will be willing to bring with them. Locals wanting an item from elsewhere can pick their location and requested object, as well as what they are willing to offer in return. This can range from cash to a tour of the area, an item of similar value, or an offer of a meal. Alternatively, tourists can offer to bring something as a gift, with no repayment expected. Each post is then advertised on the site in a similar fashion to a bulletin board. PleaseBringMe.com aims to help users receive items that may be expensive or difficult to import. It could also contribute to reducing carbon emissions through travel by combining tourist and courier journeys.

Much like craigslist, Gumtree and similar services, PleaseBringMe.com is an online platform for arranging real-world interactions, but shifts the regional aspect to a more global approach. A supply-demand model that could be adapted specifically for businesses?

Sunday, April 29, 2012

EggDrop Review

Ever since Craigslist came to existence, the newspaper's classified ads section has all but became extinct. Enter EggDrop, a new mobile app, that simplifies the marketplace process even further and allows you to take it with you.

Before EggDrop became the EggDrop it is now, it was more like eBay than Craigslist, but with a twist. Instead of people submitting their maximum bids over a specified period of time, EggDrop required sellers to designate a maximum and minimum price. Within 72 hours, the price of an item fell until someone bid on it.

But this didn't seem to work, so Dan Zheng, the app creator, and his team decided to release a revamped version of the product. Now, sellers take a picture of their merchandise, upload it to the website and decide on a price. And unlike Craigslist where you have to repost every now and then to ensure that people see your ad, EggDrop automatically does the reposting for you after a week until yo u instruct it to stop.

At EggDrop, buyers and sellers figure out a way to make payments between themselves. Sellers cannot ship items from EggDrop to make the process stay local. Further, users give each other badges and karma scores, meaning, if you don't screw people over, you get more props. EggDrop's marketplace is, in every respect, local, encouraging face-to-face interactions, and if you're a total jerk, expect to get called out.

Recently, EggDrop incorporated an anonymous messaging system to allow buyers and sellers to communicate without giving out personal information and phone numbers. There's also a wanted section where buyers get to post what exactly they're looking for and get paired with sellers who have what they are looking for, making finding what you need a lot simpler.

With about half a million downloads in 50 states and some part of the United Kingdom, there's a chance EggDrop will give Craigslist a run for its money.

Making Money Writing

Randy Cassingham is one of the first online publishers: his This is True column went online in 1994. It's his full-time gig: over the years, it has brought him several million dollars in income, and he lives on 45 acres in western Colorado, where he looks at gorgeous snow-covered mountains from his home office.

"TRUE" (as Cassingham calls it) is biting social commentary, using weird news as its vehicle. It's funny and has a loyal following: thousands pay $24/year to get the full column by e-mail each week. Tens of thousands get a free sampler. It might be the first example of an online "fremium" business model. In the early years, he turned down two unsolicited syndication deals to bring the column to newspapers -- turning them down because he didn't want to give up control of his work, he says.

Good move: now he's compiling his archives into Kindle books, where he can get a 70% royalty on sales, rather than the 12.5% that Dutton (part of the Penguin Group) pays him when it turned another of his websites into a book.

And it's working: Cassingham told me that in the first two weeks of Kindle book sales, the five volumes he has posted so far earned more than $1,400 in royalties from Amazon. "I'm boggled," he told me by e-mail. "Imagine if I actually concentrated on this income pillar. Or had more than five books available. Or I sent one or more titles out for review somewhere, or advertised, or did ANY kind of promotion to anyone other than my existing readers!"

Imagine indeed!

Then he realized that a throw-away human interest feature he includes in This is True, the "Honorary Unsubscribe" of someone who died in the previous week, could also be good book material.

"These are the people you wish you had known," he says. "Take the inventors I've featured. Did you know the same guy invented both the computer hard drive and the video cassette? What a fascinating guy!" He has also featured the inventors of the contact lens, the hovercraft, the Hawaiian shirt, even the guy who thought of putting a peanut inside an M&M. Then, he says, getting excited as he looks through his archive, "there are the medical researchers, responsible for saving thousands, even millions of lives, spectacular entertainers that died virtually forgotten, and..." Just as he says: the kind of people you wish you had known.

That book just came out on Amazon's Kindle this week, and it's the first of several in that series. Cassingham told me that "I'm glad I have a block of 100 ISBNs" -- International Standard Book Numbers, which are used to identify books for retailers, including Amazon -- "I'm going to need them."

Cassingham used to have the material now coming out in his books available free in various web archives. He counted on Google's Adsense program to bring in ad money, but it hasn't worked as well as he had hoped, even though it's all original work. "TRUE's archive," he admitted, "which had more than five volumes of material, only brought in $559 for the entirety of 2011." Compared to more than $1400 in the first two weeks on Amazon, it's no wonder Cassingham is starting to take the archives down. If someone follows a link to an archive page that has been removed, they now see information on what book it's in -- with a link to its Amazon sales page.

FreeLogoServices.com Review

Branding is an important first step in establishing market presence. Whether it be about your product, your service or your website, you definitely want something memorable for your company's image, something that represents your total brand. More often than not, however, creating a logo can be a tad too expensive when you're just starting up.

Regardless of your designing experience - whether that be extensive or none at all - Free Logo Services is an online platform that allows you to create your own logo in three easy steps:

1. Type in the text you want to appear on your logo. This may include your company's name, a slogan or catch phrase, or anything you think needs including.2. Take your pick from the massive collection of designs they have available. You can also choose to customize your selected design - change colors, text attributes, size, layout and other facets of the design.3. Once you've made up y our mind, you're ready to save your logo.

Take note that your free logo will only be saved for 5 days. At which time, you're free to make edits until you're completely satisfied with your personalized design. If you wish to download the original files for unlimited use, like on your letterhead, business cards and website, you can then opt to make a one-time purchase of AUD$39.95.

What's remarkable about Free Logo Services is that it's free, easy to use, no designing background necessary, and you only pay a nominal fee for a design you exactly so desire, much unlike hiring a local designer who may charge you hundreds, even thousands, and later get stuck with a design you're not exactly sure you like. Perhaps the only downside to Free Logo Services is the difficulty a person has to deal with when choosing one final design from thousands of options.

Judging by the more than 100,000 satisfied customers Free Logo Services has, the company sure kno ws what it's doing.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

SignalSMS Review

It's hard to stay focused in the digital world, but Signal founders Jeff Judge and Chris Watland have turned their SMS-marketing startup into a web success story by emphasizing the fundamentals. The duo got in on the ground floor of the exploding text-marketing industry, building an easy-to-use platform for firms managing SMS campaigns. Today Signal has evolved into a cross-channel marketing platform for managing text campaigns, e-mail marketing, social media and even coupons and sweepstakes from a single cloud-based account.

And they did it without a dime from outside investors.

The Chicago-based company pulls in $2.7 million in annual revenue and has run more than 200,000 campaigns for more than 1,000 clients, including Redbox and Sears, since its launch in 2006. And Signal remains lean, running a 15-person office.

From Real Estate to SMSWatland and Judge met back in '06. Watland had been working in public accounting for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Judge started out as a management consultant before a stint at web travel firm Orbitz, where he worked his way up from software engineer to director of technology. Both had ambitions for making it on their own, and they struck up a friendship pitching business ideas back and forth.

Watland and Judge were intrigued by the text alerts some local bars were sending about drink specials. Their curiosity led to what they saw as an opening in the mobile-marketing space, which was just beginning to take off. "There was no self-service text messaging where a business could come out and get going right away," Judge says.

Within a month of hatching the idea, the two were working on the new concept full-time. Judge was putting his software skills to use building a basic SMS-messaging platform, while Watland hit the pavement to gather intelligence on potential customers and what they wanted from a text-messaging service.

Their goal: Build a one-stop shop to manage and track digital campaigns. Judge estimates there were already about 200 SMS-marketing firms in the space, but no clear leader and very few offering the kind of simplicity firms were seeking.

"The industry, at least in terms of text marketing, was a lot of garbage content. Pay-to-vote, pay for wallpaper or ringtones. We started to get calls from people who said, 'If you could only pair this with e-mail,'" Judge says. "All the signs started to point to building a central platform."

Going it AloneWatland and Judge put up $35,000 apiece from personal savings and secured $100,000 in operating credit, which they've since repaid. They decided very early in the process not to go after outside investments, feeling stymied by the venture capital Kabuki dance.

"At least in Chicago, it seemed like a lot of investors who backed startup companies were interested in obvious opportunities," Judge says. "They were interested in us, but it seemed like we had to spend a lot of time piecing together who we were and why we were unique. Over time it felt like those conversations were a brick wall."

So Watland and Judge decided to focus on collecting customers instead of investors. Their first customers came from an old-fashioned referral from the business next door, followed by a few more local Chicago companies. Then more clients started to come in from AdWords, shoe-leather networking and social media.

In a lot of ways, Watland says, their timing was dead on. Some of Signal's first customers were skeptical about text marketing, but the idea wasn't completely alien, with shows like American Idol popularizing text campaigns. "I think we latched onto this pretty quickly: You want to be new and innovative, but you don't want to be too new [that] people aren't familiar with it," he says.

The do-it-yourself funding approach gave the business an edge it might have been missing with a fat bank account. "We've been scrappy and lean since day one," Judge says. "We think bootstrapping is important. It's a hell of a lot harder, but it forces you to really think through your decisions, take quick action and learn from mistakes. It's different when you have to focus on where money comes from rather than having a big cushion in the bank."

That's not to say living on the edge inspired flawless business thinking. A brief foray into building mobile smartphone apps for clients almost proved costly. "Logically it made sense at the time. Anyone can build an app, but it's a one-time enterprise, unlike our core product, text messaging, which is continuous," Watland says, noting that the experience reemphasized the value of sticking to their priorities. "It's about focusing on the core and shutting down other things that aren't core to the business."

SMS for EveryoneFor now, the focus at Signal is on continuing to refine its central service: a cross-channel marketing platform.

And while the company has so far worked mainly with larger firms, it recently debuted a freemium model for small businesses.

Matt Kubinski is the director of promotions and marketing for Lodge Management, one of Signal's earliest customers. Lodge, which manages 12 bars in the downtown Chicago area, uses the service to push promotions such as waiving cover charges for text subscribers.

"It's a very large part of what we do," Kubinski says. "We do a vocals competition at one of the bars--a grandiose karaoke contest that we kind of set up in the style of American Idol--and people vote by texting on their phones. It's a unique, fun way to get people involved."

Tools of Engagement Four social media management tools to get more buzz for your buck

HootSuiteHootSuite lets users manage multiple networks, schedule messages, develop custom analytics reports and more. HootSuite is free, but certain features, including reports, work on a points system. Users must upgrade from a free account to have access to all the site's features.

Sprout SocialWith Sprout Social, users can organize multiple accounts and multiple identities in one place, schedule messages and measure success through reports. The interface is among the sharpest around. Sprout Social also has some cool tools for discovering new people to follow and engage. Packages range from $9 per month to $899 per month.

ActionlyActionly is a paid social media monitoring tool that gives users the ability to create custom searches from which to pull data, track ROI and measure post-click conversations. It also facilitates the management of multiple social media accounts from its dashboard. Best of all, Actionly integrates with Google Analytics. Plans are $50, $100 and $400 per month.

NutshellMailNutshellMail from Constant Contact tracks users' social media presence on a number of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, foursquare and YouTube, and delivers a summary via e-mail. The tool is free, and therefore great for managing brands on a budget.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Hot Startups Threadflip

If you're a person who loves to shop, there's a chance you'll come across an item or two that's sitting practically new inside your closet. And if the novelty and/or thrill of the idea of owning such an item already left you, you can always put your unwanted fashion up for sale.

San Francisco startup Threadflip is out to give users a novel way of discovering, buying and selling fashion. Users of the site upload images of items - clothing, bags, shoes, jewelry - they wish to sell and set their own price tags. Photos can be imported from Instagram and Facebook.

One feature the site offers is convenient shipping. The moment your item lands itself a buyer, Threadflip sends you a prepaid box, shipping label, even wrapping material. And if you're hands are too full to allow you time to do the selling yourself, Threadflip also offers a "white glove service" where all you do is send your items t o the company, and Threadflip's stylists do the photo uploading and pricing research for you.

A 15% cut goes to Threadflip for regular sales, whereas it charges 40% of the purchase price for its white glove service.

Threadflip aims to build a tight and solid community of social shopping enthusiasts.

Tech Startups - ScanMe.com

Before Apple released the iPad 2, Garrett Gee made a lucky guess. “I knew it was going to have a camera, and because of that I just imagined that there would be a blog post or something similar on the top 10 new apps for the iPad 2,” he says.

Gee wasn’t just the average college student geeking out. A student at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, he is one of the founders of Scan (scan.me), which allows iPad, iPhone and Droid users to scan quick-response (QR) codes.

Gee’s push to get his hands on the iPad 2 and get it to his iOS developer was motivated by his desire for Scan to be the first QR-scanner app available specifically for the device–thereby earning a spot on those top 10 lists. Thanks to two sleepless nights, he succeeded.

Gee’s path from student to entrepreneur started in 2009, when he received a smartphone for Christmas. With that device, the then-freshman scanned his first QR code and realized there could be apps and software that were less clunky and easier to use. At a web-design conference, he met Twitter creative director Doug Bowman, who encouraged him to pursue his idea.

Gee recruited classmates Kirk Ouimet and Ben Turley to help launch Scan in February 2011. The idea was to use simple online and mobile tools to give users a better option for scanning QR codes, and to offer a polished option for businesses that wanted to create those codes.

“There are many, many sites where you can go and create your own QR code,” Gee concedes. “Remember when Facebook and Twitter were first getting popular, and businesses large and small all hopped on and started creating Twitter accounts and Facebook pages? They didn’t really know how or why; they were just doing it because they thought it was important. It’s been the same story with QR codes. People see them popping up all over the place, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, we should probably use QR codes for our marketing.’”

Gee, Ouimet and Turley took second place in BYU’s business plan competition in April 2011–a status they parlayed into funding. After 16 trips to pitch to investors such as Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures and the co-owner of the Boston Celtics, they had $1.5 million. Gee waded through the offers while balancing school and travel as a forward on BYU’s semiprofessional soccer team, often taking conference calls in airport bathrooms along the way.

The team used that capital to build a platform and user base that earned Scan 10 million downloads in the first year. The actual scans derived from those downloads grew from 12 million to 21 million between September and October 2011. The next move is to develop a monetization plan. Today the software to read or create codes is free of charge; future options will include premium content and mobile-commerce templates.

Gee, now 25, is working toward graduating from BYU. For now, the dual student-CEO role is serving him well. “People relate to the student world quite well,” he says. “You could say I play the ‘student card’ quite often when I’m meeting with big companies. It definitely scores me empathy points.”

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Spoon That Measures Salt Content Of The Food You Are Eating.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, can be a killer condition. It can lead to a whole host of potentially fatal diseases like kidney failure, heart attack or stroke. Hypertension can be caused by obesity, heredity, a high-salt diet, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, etc. While heredity is something a person doesn't have control over, smoking, a sedentary lifestyle and a high-salt diet are some things a person can control.

More than home-prepared foods, restaurant and processed foods are unquestionably saltier. So for people, especially the ageing population with escalating health concerns, who need to lower their salt intake, the Salinity Monitor Spoon recently launched by Japanese Compact Impact measures the salinity of soups and sauces at temperatures between 140F (60C) and 176F (80C). The spoon is put into the soup or other liquid foods, and the gauge on the spoon indicates whether the food's saltin ess is between 0.6% and 0.8%, 0.9% and 1.1% or 1.2% and above. This way, the user can decide how much of the food to consume. The Salinity Monitor Spoon is currently pegged at US $58.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Startups That Care - StearClear

For most people, spending time out with friends on a Friday night after a week of work, work, work is the perfect way to unwind. Sometimes, however, a person gets carried away and drinks more than he should.

Chances are your mother - or somebody who truly cares about you - already told you this a couple of hundred times, but let me say it again: If you had too much to drink and are impaired to drive home, better not risk your and other people's safety. It's just not worth it. In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that every year, roughly 12,000 DUI-related deaths and 900,000 DUI/DWI arrests take place.

STEARCLEAR, a free mobile application (available for both Android and iOS) allows you to connect with members of a drive team within your vicinity who then pick you up and do the driving for you. At STEARCLEAR, everything is automated: request, pickup, mileage, fare, payment. With a single touch on your ph one, you get to select a STEARCLEAR team nearby and arrange for a driver to pick you up, and once you're at your destination, with another tap on your phone, you and the driver receive total cost, including tip, on your mobiles. Upon registration with STEARCLEAR, your credit card is registered, too.

If you have company, you can arrange multiple stops along the way, so your friends arrive at their destinations safely as well.

STEARCLEAR drivers are carefully selected and coached. Once a driver is deemed eligible to join, he gets his own phone app that connects him with pickup requests. As of the moment, STEARCLEAR is looking for drivers and drive teams. If you're interested, go to their website and register.

How I Turned Hobby Into A Thriving Crowdsourcing Business. Part 2.

No matter how big your ‘blog network’ is (most likely you don’t have one at all), sooner or later you have to get publicity from blogs that you don’t control. So this part is going to be about how I got free publicity for PickyDomains.com from other people’s blogs.

If you want other bloggers to write about you, the number one tool is Technorati. It was absolutely indispensible to me when I started promoting PickyDomains.com in 2007. Essentially Technorati tracks only blogs and news sites, it ranks them according to popularity and divides into different a categories. For example, there is a section of over 30,000 blogs and news sites that cover technology, which was a good fit for me. There is also section for small business with 20,000+ blogs, which was also a great fit for our risk-free naming business. Most popular sites are listed first, but more than likely, you won’t get any response from the Top 100 blogs. Whatever your new startup is about, with Technorati you can find a group of blogs and news sites that cover your industry.

The next step is to contact blog owner. Bloggers are bombarded with e-mails daily, so if you send them your press-release, this will only piss them off (I’ll have a section about how I do press-releases with great results). And ‘Hey, you might want to write about my new startup’ won’t work either.

Since I was a total noob, at first I simply explained my situation to bloggers I contacted – that I started a company and had no clue how to market it. However silly this approach might have been, it worked surprisingly well – John Dvorak of Dvorak.org, for instance, was happy to help me out.

Then I changed my approach completely. Instead of ASKING for something, I started OFFERING something for free. I would write a short e-mail that would read along these lines

‘Hi John!I really enjoy your blog. I recently started a new company called PickyDomains.com – it’s a crowdsourcing naming service where other people help you name your company, website or product. If you are starting a new project and can’t seem to come up with a perfect domain on your own, let me know and we’ll do work for you 100% free of charge.’

This ‘giveaway’ approach worked very well, even though only a small fraction took me up on my offer (and quite a few bloggers actually paid us instead). Why would you want to give away your product to bloggers? Simple - connections. Bloggers are generally very well connected and not just via their blog. Once they learned that there is such a thing as risk-free naming service where you pay ONLY if you decide to use one of suggested names, domains or slogans, they’d pass this information on whenever the occasion arose (like when their buddy complained that he can’t find good available domain name).

PickyDomians.com will work for free with blog owners (as long as your blog is real and has traffic). Simply mention PickyDomains in one of our blog posts and send us a URL of your post. You can take us up on this offer only once.

Because it takes quite a bit of time and effort to contact each individual blogger, I figured I’d save myself some time and effort and advertise the fact that we do free work for bloggers on the front page. I get several publications each month this way.

Another approach with bloggers you might want to consider, if you have a lot of time, is commenting. If you become a regular reader and commenter on a blog, eventually quite a few people will go to your site, if your username is the same as your website URL.

Obviously, you can’t be spamming. And the more insightful your comments are, the more the urge to find out who’s the user who leaves them. I, personally, don’t use this approach because I don’t have enough time, but it’s something to keep in mind.

So far we’ve covered how to promote your startup with your own blog networks and by contacting blogger. I’ve also spent thousands on paid reviews and learned how you can pay only 30 bucks to a blogger who wanted $100 per review – so this will be covered in the next section of How I Turned Hobby Into A Thriving Crowdsourcing Business.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Meet Mike Mann, The Biggest Domainer You've Never Heard About

The next time you find yourself pounding your keyboard in frustration because the domain name you want is already taken, direct your ire toward Mike Mann.

Mann is one of the longest members of the clubby world of domain speculators, and he's buying up names in force these days. And not all on the aftermarket, as some others do. But new names. Dot-com names that aren't registered -- even though 100 million-plus already are -- that he then turns around and sells for a few hundred bucks, sometimes far more.

And this week, in a span that lasted less than 24 hours across Tuesday and Wednesday, Mann snapped up 14,962 domains -- 1,822 starting Tuesday evening and the rest on Wednesday.

"I'm just really greedy," said Mann, a man no one would describe as modest. "I want to own the world."

First, the quick backstory. Mann, who's 45 and lives in Delaware, joined the dot-com land grab relatively early, in the late 1990s. He had founded an ISP called Internet Interstate, but one day in 1998, much to his surprise, he got a $25,000 offer for a domain he owned, Menus.com. The following day he got a $50,000 offer.

"I was like, 'I paid $70 for this,'" said Mann, who tends to sport dark glasses and, despite the outfit in the photo, doesn't smoke cigarettes. "The next day, I went into the domain business."

Mann went on to become one of the most aggressive domain speculators in a world that was -- and still largely is -- the digital Wild West. In the early years, registering good names wasn't that hard, and some people made many, many millions doing just that.

But as time went on, it became far more difficult. The shrewdest (or craftiest) of the so-called domainers went to great lengths to bag their URL prey. They wrote scripts to pound on the registrars, working in the dark of night to "catch" names the nanosecond they expired, or "dropped." (The king of the "drop catchers" was a mysterious man named Yun Ye, who built a portfolio he sold to the now-public Marchex in 2005 for $164 million.)

Some cut deals with small registrars so they could get direct connections to the names that were expiring -- in effect, buying their way to the front of the line, as I documented in this piece, "The man who owns the Internet." Helping to drive it all: Google and Yahoo, which supply the pay-per-click ads that fill so many undeveloped, or "parked," sites that people land on by typing URLs directly into a browsers' address bar.

Mann held his own -- big time. He built up a business called BuyDomains that in 2005 he sold to Boston-based Highland Capital for about $80 million. That business is now called NameMedia, and it's going strong, though in 2008 it pulled its planned IPO because of the economic meltdown. One thing that Mann sold to NameMedia: A patent he was awarded in 2003 for a system he developed to generate domain name recommendations and then register the domains.

In short, Mann came up with his own weapons. After he sold to NameMedia, of which he still owns a 15 percent stake, Mann had a noncompete that kept him away from the domain game for about four years. Instead, he worked on his many other ventures, such as SEO.com and a nonprofit called Grassroots.org.

But as soon as he could, he jumped back in. That was about two years ago, and ever since, he's been buying an average of 300 names a day and selling them through his company, DomainMarket.com. That business, he said, brings in about $400,000 a month.

Over the last couple of months, however, cash flow got tight as he was focused on other businesses, so Mann held off buying names. He didn't stop adding to his list of names to buy, however. It's that list that turned into this week's shopping spree.

"I haven't heard of anyone doing an en masse splurge like that in several years," said Ron Jackson, who runs Domain Name Journal, the trade site for the domain world.

So how did he do it? Part software power, part human power. He starts with a tool built in-house that, among other things, sifts through Google-friendly keywords, looks at traffic potential, filters out obvious trademark violators, and then ranks and scores possible names. Then comes the human part.

"We have a filter, but I'm the world's most efficient human filter for this sort of thing," said Mann, true to form. "I don't think anyone can read huge lists of domain names as quickly as I can and understand what they're reading. I'm a pattern reader. It's a huge pain in the ass, but it's what I do for a living."

Then the machines take over. "The robot just goes to the registrars -- buy, buy, buy," he said.

While some big domainers run their own registrars, cutting out the likes of Go Daddy as middlemen so they can buy directly from VeriSign, which runs the registry, Mann does not. He registers his names through Go Daddy and several others. The cost of his two-day binge: Roughly $100,000.

These names are not Internet gold, mind you. They are not Sex.com, which sold for the highest price on record and, incidentally, which Mann was a part owner of for a while. They're names like CeoHealthClub.com, ChineseFoodCatering.com, BaptistChurchCamp.com and DrugDevelopers.com -- names that he's confident he can sell for a decent profit.

"There's these idiots that are questioning this, claiming I don't know what I'm doing and throwing away my money," said Mann. "The issue is whether this batch worth is 100K. Any professional can tell you yes."

That's astonishing confidence in a market this hard to predict. The value of names collapsed with the economy a few years ago, and demand dried up for all but the best names. And plenty of companies are glad to start their businesses with .CO or .ME names, or simply use quirky spellings so as not to pay the crazy prices demanded by greedy domainers, which is why Flickr and Digg are spelled the way they are.

Even so, I wouldn't bet against Mann. Nor would I suggest trying this at home.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

7 Cookbooks For The Cost Conscious

We tend to think about French cuisine as the ‘best’ in Europe and Italians traditionally get a lot of praise for their amazing pizzas and pastas. But if you’ve ever been to Chicago, you know them Polacks can cook too. Not only zurek, pierogy and kielbasa are amazingly delicious, Polish people never use expensive ingredients and I guarantee that all the spices you’ll need, you already have in your kitchen. Once you go Polish, there is no turning back.

The “five minutes” in the title and “discovery” sounds a lot like marketing schmuckery but the secret is simple - you just make the no knead dough in just a few minutes and keep it in your fridge for use over the next 2 weeks. You can make a loaf when you get home from work and serve it for dinner - hot, crispy and smelling like the streets of Paris. There are many recipes included, but it gives you more relaxed attitude toward the bread. I showed the book to a friend and rather than copy a few of the recipes, she decided to order the book herself because she said that everything looked good and it looked like stuff she would really make. Not many cookbooks earn that comment.

I bet you’ll read this one from cover to cover. Because this is a kind of cookbook that walks with you on your culinary endevors like your mom or grandma would, telling you stories along the way. ‘Nothing goes to waste’ is the frugal cook rule number one and the author doesn’t just tell us, he shows us, how to be self-sufficient about making and storing food (even if you don’t have a stove or refrigerator): from fermenting classics like sauerkraut to making sourdough, cheese, miso, tempeh, wine, homebrewed beer and, it seems, almost every other fermented food made the world over.

Personally, I love meat. But (unless you live in Alaska or like exotic imported produce) generally speaking vegetarian dishes are a lot cheaper than carnivorous ones. If only they did not taste like … well, vegetarian cooking. Deborah Madison, who is known as ‘our Julia Childs’ in vegan circles, succesfully solves the problem. Warning: this book is thick and heavy.

Once again, the long title is probably the fruit of the labor of publisher’s marketing department. But when the book has been in print since mid 80s, you know it’s good. Since I love cooking, spending time in the kitchen is not problem for me. But what’s great about this book is a systematic approach - you are given ready shopping lists, cooking lists and menu cycles. All you have to do is follow directions. If you have a large family, this one is a gift from culinary gods.

Though this book is pricey, great sauce or marinade can make the simplest foods taste amazing. What’s pasta without sauce? Would you eat your tortilla chips without salsa or nacho cheese? Or think how ranch dressing transforms regular salad. With 661 pages this book can transform pretty much any dish into something as spicy, as exotic or as traditional as you’d like. Oh, and you also absolutely must have The Flavor Bible.

Most cookbooks assume that you are cooking for a family. But oftentimes it’s the singles who need the most ‘help’ with home cooking, because they think it’s not worth it, when you can stop by the Burger King or order pizza and have ‘cold breakfast’ as well in the morning (you know who you are). While this cookbook can be used if you are married and have big family (most recipes are gourmeish with southwest slant), you are sure to appreciate that someone did all the calculations for you and even told you what you have to do with leftovers.

Weird Startups - Grafighters.Com

You're bored, really bored. The meeting had been going on for hours and hours now, with no end in sight anytime soon. Unfortunately, you don't have much of choice. Like it or not, you have to see through the ridiculously boring exchange or you won't get a full day's pay. And then you ask yourself, what else can you do to keep your sanity in place? You look at your notes, and there, in the margins of your notepad, you find yourself doodling an awesome eight-legged creature with sharp fangs, an evil-looking grin and scorching red balls for eyes. As the hours slip away, you wonder how different things would be if the creature came to life and scared everyone in the meeting room away.

Sounds familiar?

An up-and-coming gaming company called Grafighters intends to do just that - bring your creatures to life and play with them, in the virtual world, at least. Grafighters is a gaming platform where users can send doodles to fight against each other. First thing you need to do is draw the creature you have in mind on a piece of paper. Using the app provided on Grafighters, you go through an uploading process where you specify the drawing's body parts. If the drawing has a really big head, you get points for intelligence. If it has muscly arms, you're awarded points for strength. If the drawing is tiny and well-balanced, expect some points for speed. Your character's category, like "toughness category" or "intelligence category," will determine its fighting technique the moment it goes into battle.

As of this writing, there are a couple of different environment stages available. There's the Deep Sea Ocean, Ghost Town, London Street, and there's also the North Pole, a Christmas-themed level.

Eric Cleckner and Dave Chenell, the brains behind Grafighters, are looking to launch the app on the iPhone, too, so that your character can be with you wherever you go - Tamagotchi fashion - except that this character is your own creation.

So will your character be breathing fire, or sprouting spikes when mad like a porcupine?

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Mobile Startups - Apptopia

These days, in the mobile world, mobile apps are big and getting bigger. Something, however, is amiss. Despite the continually advancing number of users who supposedly should be helping app developers pocket some cash they rightfully deserve for their ingenuity and hard work, such is not the case. Enter Apptopia, a new marketplace where mobile app ownership can be conveniently bought and sold, just like on eBay.

If you're an app developer looking to profit from your creation, simply list your app for sale with Apptopia. For bidding to begin, explain what your app is about and pick the site category where it will be featured. If you're a buyer, the company lets you own not just the app but also the code, its users and revenue. The average app normally sells for $7,500, and Apptopia takes a 15% cut off each sale.

According to one of the founders (Jo nathan Kay), Apptopia will be partnering with a company specializing in ratings and reviews, providing everyone with relatable user experience. Further, integration with platforms specializing in analytics, like Flurry and Localytics, will help provide buyers with additional data points. An app valuation tool is slated to become available soon as well.

Apptopia, if successful, hopes to build a platform that helps newcomer developers know the value of their work and avoid making the mistake of selling what they labored so hard for for just a portion of what it's really worth.

Million Dollar Ideas - Canopy Tours

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Ken Stamps spotted a business idea thousands of miles from his Michigan home, in rainforest-rich Costa Rica, where a popular tourist attraction sends travelers soaring through the treetops on a pulley.

"There are far fewer Costa Rica-type canopy tours in the U.S.," said Stamps. In contrast, most American zip-lining companies are at manmade attractions, such as theme parks or water parks and not in a tree canopy.

After 27 years in the architecture and engineering industry near Detroit, Stamps was hungry for a career change. In 2009, he launched -- with partners Sam and John Walker, a father-son team -- Navitat Canopy Adventures, a zip-lining-tour company in densely wooded areas it leases in Asheville, N.C.; and Wrightwood, Calif.

The company set up cables atop sloped areas of the woods. Participants are strapped into a harness that's attached to a pulley, then gravity sends them sailing among the treetops.

In October 2010, just six months after opening its first facility (242 acres in Asheville), Navitat passed over the $1 million in revenues mark. "We all celebrated," said Stamps. "We had a little Champagne." By the end of November, 16,000 guests had visited the Asheville facility. Last year, the number increased to 22,000, which included visitors to the Wrightwood, Calif., facility that opened in July.

Zip-lining tours are on the rise in the United States, with the first few arriving only a decade ago. "We were the first builder that I was aware of in 2002," said Dave Gustafson of EBL Canopy Tours -- which installed canopy lines until 2005 and now operates zip-lining tours in several U.S. cities.

"We believe there's about 250 courses in the U.S. and about 36 million zips were taken last year," Gustafson said. Familiar with Navitat, he praised the design, which was built by John Walker's other company, Bonsai Design.

"John tends to be an artistic, flair kind of guy," said Gustafson. "His courses are pretty."

Stamps' goal is to inject an eco-friendly aspect into the tours, such as schooling in local flora and fauna, to make these more than "thrill rides in the forest," he said.

Fueled by the vision of a gorgeous, conservation-minded course, Stamps and the Walkers put $1.5 million of their own money into the business. Still, there were challenges. The welcome center they designed from the ground up was too cramped to serve visitors' needs, and they were forced to expand it.

Another problem was underestimating how many employees they'd need to keep the courses running. Because of the highly specialized skill set, a lot of time, money and thought are put into staffing and training. Stamps will often look at competitors to find employees already familiar with zip-lining.

Training in groups of between eight and 10, potential employees complete 70 hours of required technical training, plus an additional 30 hours of interpretive training on local plant ecology, culture and history. Guides are then required to complete an additional four hours of technical and interpretive training each month they are on the job.

"If they didn't pass all of that training they aren't offered a job," said Stamps. Individuals who manage each location are treated as partners. There are about 40 guides at each location, in addition to managers and sales staff.

Turning to outside help was a lifesaver. An environmental-planning employee hired by Stamps helps design the courses -- making sure the environment does not get destroyed in the building process. The staffer also trains tour guides in interpreting flora and fauna. Wanting to offer a top-notch experience, the Walkers attended Disney Institute to learn how to replicate the storied Disney experience provided to guests at Walt Disney World.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Pawsitively Purfrect Petal Pull Cart

Sheryl Bass and her husband Neil Cline stumbled on an idea for a business as they were planning their wedding in 2006. Both wanted their dogs to participate in the wedding but didn't want anything that would be uncomfortable to wear or anything that would be toxic. Bass wanted her dog to fulfill the traditional "flower child" role, but no such product existed for the pet to hold the flower petals as they were distributed.

And so, Pawsitively Purrfect Products and its "Pet Petal Pullcart" was created.

It just so happens that Cline is pretty handy, Bass says. After testing various contraptions on their own pet, they came up with a wooden cart that attaches to a harness and dispenses flower petals from the back. The customizable hand-carved pull cart is for small dogs (less than 30 pounds) and sells for $130 on the company's website.

Bass and her husband, who both have full-time jobs as a publicist and psychotherapist, respectively, have hit on an explosive trend -- consumers are expected to spend nearly $53 billion on pets in 2012, according to the American Pet Products Association. Boutique businesses that offer pet outfits, treats (that literally look good enough for humans to eat) and toys are on the rise. And so is the trend of including furry loved ones in weddings.

The Pet Petal Pullcart is so popular that the couple cannot keep up with production (pull carts are made-to-order given the pet's weight and length specifications), Bass says. However, the couple has had to turn away customers, especially those looking to use the product for bigger breeds.

Bass says they hope to license the product, so that a bigger company can mass produce the item and come up with a solution to the big-breed dilemma. She also wants to add other products to the business down the line, she says.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Baseball Cookies A Homerun

Cracker Jack, peanuts, hot dogs. It almost seems like ballpark food is more exciting than the game itself. And if Pati Grady has anything to do with it, we'll soon be adding shortbread cookies to the list of iconic ballpark snacks.

In 2004, Grady searched online for a baseball cookie cutter to no avail. Improvising, she used a drinking glass to cut rounds out of dough made from her family's shortbread recipe and used a crimping tool to make stitches.

Coincidentally, the cookies were the exact size of MLB regulation baseballs, and Grady sensed that she had the seed for a new business. She incorporated and named the company Cooperstown Cookie, in honor of her hometown and the location of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

In 2008, Cooperstown Cookie scored official licenses with Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame, doubling sales immediately. "It changed everything," Grady said. "And with licenses, the world of wholesale opened up."

Today, she supplies her treats to stadiums across the country, from Busch Stadium in St. Louis to Seattle's Safeco Field. Grady also does a pretty brisk online business, selling cookies packaged in boxes and teams emblazoned with team logos.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

How I Turned Hobby Into A Thriving Crowdsourcing Business

I have turned my hobby (playing with words) into a thriving crowdsourcing business (PickyDomains.com). Ok, the income may be fluctuating rather wildly (last month I had a day when I received $1000 worth of new orders, but I also had a day when only one order was placed), but this is mostly my own fault. Out of 5 years PickyDomains.com exists, I’ve really marketed it heavily only probably around 9 months and because it was not my primary income source, so for a few years PickyDomains kind of lived its own life and marketed itself.

I am not writing this post to ‘inspire’ anyone. I think there is a log of ‘inspiroin’ going around. Rather I am going to tell you EXACTLY what I did and hopefully some of these tricks will help you strike on your own or get to the income level where you don’t have to work 9-5 job (unless that’s what you love doing).

So let’s start at the beginning. I was born in Russia and in 1995 moved to US. I finished highschool, then went to a community college, before finally graduating with BS in Microbiology. I worked in a lab for a while but then I decided to move back to Russia. Except there was no job for American-trained microbiologists there. I hooked up with my school buddies there who turned programmers. I told them about shareware and we started a few shareware related businesses, that were quite profitable for a while, but are now mostly dead – namely DePrice.Com (shareware discounter) and SoftwareJudge.com (it think the idea is brilliant and most likely I’ll relaunch it with iPad and Android in mind when I get a chance).

One of the things Russian shareware community really needed was names and domains for their software that sounded ‘American’. Several translation and localization services offered a deal where you paid about $100 and was offered 10 names or domains to choose from. But oftentimes you’d spend $100 and get nothing decent. So I came up with the idea of risk-free naming service. A client would tell me what he wanted and I’d send him or her a list of suggestions. If they decided to use one of suggestions, I’d get $50.

I worked and it work real well. After a year or two I had so many orders, it was humanly impossible to do them all myself. Two things were obvious. First, I really should involve others in naming projects and split the pay with them, and second, I really should not limit myself to Russian shareware community. The whole world is out there. This is how PickyDomains.Com was born.

Now, mind you, I started naming domains way back in 2003 and PickyDomains.com was registered in late 2006. Nowadays even Google is involved in domain naming (through Prizes.Org) but back then the idea of crowdsourcing naming service was pretty novel. I didn’t even hear the word ‘crowdsourcing’ until much, much later.

How do I market the site that nobody outside a tiny community of Russian shareware programmers (3000 people back then) knows about? Blogs.

Blogs fall into two categories – those you own and those you don’t. If it’s your blog – you can post whatever you want, whenever you want. The more people read you, the better it is. That’s obvious. I already had a rather popular personal blog in Russian, but my prospects were mostly in US and Europe. I didn’t have time for another personal blog, so I started a network of blog ‘aggregators’.

Back then a rather popular idea was creating ‘autoblogs’. Supposedly you’d set your blog to automatically publish RSS feeds by keyword or keyphrase. Like ‘startups’. Your blog would aggregate stories from Google News or Yahoo News that contained word ‘startups’, you’d monetize the traffic through Adsense and what not, and get rich, rich, rich. Joel Comm was one of the sleazebags particularly popular during this ‘Adsense riches’ era. But I knew it would never work and it did not (except for Joel Comm who made millions selling his shitty e-books, but that’s how life works).

Since I loved startups stories, especially about unusual startups, I figured I’d select best stories myself the post them on the blog. My bet was that other people would appreciate the fact that they can come to one place and get their daily fix of cool startup stories. And I was right. It worked quite well. In fact, second generation news aggregators, like Huffington Post and BusinessInsider.Com really did strike it rich (I believe HuffPost was sold for 300+ million dollars).

Of course, my blog network was never that big, but it did achieve its main goal – I’ve had blogs that had several hundred to several thousand daily readers each. You are reading one such blog that remains popular with people and even social networks (posts from NicheGeek get picked up regularly by Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Digg and StumbleUpon).

Famous Chinese saying goes ‘The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best is now.’ This is exactly how I feel about having your own media resources. You’ll need them in the future (and they pay for themselves via commission and ad revenue even when you aren’t using them to promote your projects).

While you may not want to do exactly what I did, when you are just launching something, having own blog, site, news aggregator, social network community or forum where you have maybe only 500 readers can really mean life or death of an idea. These first orders may prove to be really critical, especially psycologically. But since it’s safe to assume that very few people will go out and ‘plant trees’ today, I’ll tell you how I got free publicity from blogs I did not own and control.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Smart Ideas - SafetyTats

If you have you ever lost your child, even for a moment, you know that it is every parent’s worst nightmare.

Here’s a product to make you feel better about that eventuality: SafetyTats are temporary child identification tattoos that when applied to a child’s arm provide an immediate and highly visible form of identification and contact should your child become lost. Unlike just writing your telephone number of your child’s arm, the temporary tattoo is waterproof.

Where’d the idea come from?

The idea for SafetyTat temporary child ID tattoos was born of necessity one weekend at an amusement park. On Labor Day Weekend, Baltimore Mom, Michele Welsh and her husband, there with their three small children, felt out-numbered. To stave her panic, she quickly wrote her mobile phone number on each of their arms with a ballpoint pen. As she did this, she thoughtfully explained to each of them the importance of staying close to Mommy and Daddy. She also told them that if they were separated that the number on their arm was a way to reconnect with them.

Throughout the day of fun, Michele had to rewrite the number several times as it smeared or washed off. Several parents in the park stopped her to ask if that was her number on the kids’ arms. Each time, they loved the idea.

The day was a success and the idea for SafetyTat temporary child id tattoos was born.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

New Startup Wants To Make Registering Trademark Online As Simple As Getting Domain Name

Trademarkia is an online search engine that helps small-business owners sift through the more than six million names, slogans and logos that have been trademarked in America since 1870. The Web site, which went live in September 2009, grafts a user-friendly interface onto a colossal database, built with free information provided by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It also serves as a lure, steering visitors who want to apply for their own trademarks to the law firm of Trademarkia’s co-founder, Raj Abhyanker, and offering other fee-based services such as domain registration, logo design and automated alerts that notify trademark holders when marks similar to their own are filed.

Employees: Eight full-time. In addition, in the last three years, Trademarkia has generated enough business to help Mr. Abhyanker’s law firm grow from a solo practice to an international operation with more than 190 employees, including more than 60 lawyers.

Founders: Mr. Abhyanker, 36, Trademarkia’s chief executive, is a lawyer and serial entrepreneur who previously founded FatDoor, a social networking site for neighbors. (In 2007, Mr. Abhyanker was ousted as chief executive of FatDoor, which later transformed into The Dealmap and was purchased by Google in 2011.) He founded Trademarkia with Dongxia Liu, 39, a software developer and the former vice president of engineering at Imagekind. Ms. Liu now serves as chief technology officer.

Location: Trademarkia is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., in the same building as Mr. Abhyanker’s law firm, which also has satellite offices in India, China and France.

Pitch: “We want to make applying for a trademark as easy as getting a domain name,” Mr. Abhyanker said.

Traction: Based on the strength of Trademarkia, which gets nearly three million page views each month, Mr. Abhyanker expects his legal practice to file for more than 13,000 trademarks this year (about 10,000 American and 3,000 overseas). “We’re basically the law firm that represents the most small businesses in terms of intellectual property,” he said.

Revenue: In 2011, according to Mr. Abhyanker, Trademarkia brought in $1.3 million in revenue and the law firm brought in $5.5 million, excluding government filing fees that passed through both companies. He said he expected both figures to grow by 50 percent this year.

Financing: No outside money. “I had a bad taste about venture capital,” Mr. Abhyanker explained, after losing control of FatDoor. He bootstrapped Trademarkia with about $25,000 in seed money. As for the law firm, he added, that began in 2005 with $1,000 from his savings, a small office over a Palo Alto rug store, a used desk from Craigslist and a Web site he built himself. While he doesn’t plan to pursue venture capital, “I’d like to have investors that are other lawyers,” he said, adding that, he’s considering using crowdfunding from California-licensed attorneys.

Marketing: Trademarkia spends roughly $1 million each year on paid search advertising, mostly Google AdWords. Even so, Mr. Abhyanker said, most of Trademarkia’s traffic relies on word of mouth and in-bound links from other sites, such as Wikipedia.

Competition: Online rivals include LegalZoom, the legal documents company that offers a smorgasbord of services, and The Trademark Company, which offers registration packages starting at $149, undercutting Trademarkia’s basic offering by $10. Competitors also include big international law firms, such as Greenberg Traurig and K&L Gates, which have dominated the trademark space.

Challenge: Mr. Abhyanker isn’t shy about his ambitions. “Our goal, in the end, is to build the biggest law firm in the world,” he said. He wants to do that in two ways: first, by making other types of public data – including patents, copyrights and incorporations – “more interesting and accessible” to consumers. He also plans to rebrand Trademarkia with a new name, LegalForce, and wants to pivot the company into a hybrid with both a strong online presence and brick-and-mortar storefronts serving mostly business owners, available for franchise by independent attorneys. He envisions the latter as “the Apple store meets H&R Block” and hopes to have between five and 10 of them open within 18 months.